Island-hopping in the Galápagos

Galápagos National Park

Tintoreras is a scrabble of basaltic lava, specked with
lichens watered by the garúa, and fringed with bright mangrove. A
white-tipped reef shark sleeps in a gully of water below
us.

Periodically someone cries 'Oh!' and changes their step:
another ambush by immobile iguana. You look down and what you
thought was lava looks back at you. The marine iguana has more or
less cracked life's problems. It sprawls in the sun, with all its
companions to hand, until it becomes hot and the tide is low. It
then swims out to gorge on algae. The water cools it, so now it
must sunbathe and digest. Marine iguanas delighted the novelist
Kurt Vonnegut. 'It is a covered stewpot, getting hotter and hotter
while the sunshine cooks the seaweed. It continues to stare into
the middle distance at nothing, as before, but with this
difference: it now spits up increasingly hot saltwater from time to
time,' he wrote.

The iguanas' ancestors earned their descendants this
tranquility by a perilous voyage. Everything endemic to the islands
descends from something which made the journey from South America,
either by flying, swimming or floating, as the tortoises are
thought to have done. In the case of the forbears of the iguana,
lava lizard and the Galápagos mouse, it took a voyage estimated at
15 days, minimum, given the ideal current and raft of vegetation.
Two large mammals made the trip: fur seals from Peru and sea lions
from California, and their Galápagos descendants are endemic. A
colony of the latter is strewn over a beach. It is difficult to
imagine a more contented scene. Sea lions seem to make a comical
virtue of their incapacities on land, rolling, stretching and
hugging.